The Guardian view on Christianity in Britain: neither here nor there

Britain struggles with the uneasy legacy of the much more religious country it once was

‘Nervousness over Christmas is an absurd expression of a real void at the heart of soulless technocracy.’ Above, Christmas crib, designed by Tomoaki Suzuki, in Trafalgar Square, London, December 2016.
Photograph: Matthew Chattle/Rex/Shutterstock

Something very strange is going on. The chairman of the Equality and Human Rights Commission feels he must tell employers it is OK to celebrate Christmas, and that this will not offend unbelievers. The prime minister announces in parliament that of course people should be able to speak freely about their religious convictions. A thinktank argues that there should be a duty of “reasonable accommodation” to religious belief. All these are symptoms of a deep unease and confusion about the role of Christianity in British life.

Britain is a country with an established church in England and another national church in Scotland, a secular ruling class, and a population largely indifferent to distinctively Christian beliefs and overwhelmingly reluctant to go to church, which displays a growing hostility to the notion of “religion” at all. There are also significant religious minorities, primarily Muslim, who have their own arguments with secularism as well as with Christianity.

Some churches see their control of schools as a way back towards relevance, and the government is tempted by the idea that Christian-based schooling produces better results than the purely secular, even though the best research suggests that faith works in practice simply as a proxy for selection on the basis of class and parental wealth.

Much of the noise is based around the tendentious claim that conservative Christians who are prevented from discriminating against gay people are thereby discriminated against. The argument is hardly convincing. Although there were important issues of free speech involved in the case of Ashers bakery in Belfast, and in some other recent cases that did not come to court, Christians are not being persecuted if they are prevented from exercising their beliefs in ways that harm others. Neither are the followers of any other religion.

These prohibitions are not purely the imposition of secular law on religious believers. They are also the imposition of one kind of religious belief on another. There are people motivated by equally sincere and (theologically speaking) equally well-argued religious convictions on both sides of all these debates.

What is more, the conservative Christian case is fundamentally compromised when it is pitched in terms of “religious” freedom rather than what is actually meant, which is that the law of the land should follow specifically Christian principles. Religion is notoriously hard to define, as is secularism. Deciding which kinds of belief deserve special protection even if none are to be treated as theologically true turns out to be very complicated. Unfortunately it is also necessary. It is impossible to construct a nation or any community without shared moral values and practices, and surprisingly difficult to decide, as it were, from first principles, how to move these values beyond platitudes and into action. There is in some secularist discussions an unwarranted assumption that all real disagreement is political, whereas religious opinions are distinguished by being either platitudinous or false. In fact they can be inextricably tangled, and the religious aspect can make political disputes much harder to resolve.

Nervousness over Christmas is an absurd expression of a real void at the heart of soulless technocracy

And here the Christian critique has something to offer the rest of the country. There is a long tradition of religious thought about the development of virtues and values. The Christian version derives ultimately from Socrates and Aristotle, but those philosophers thought virtue was entirely compatible with slavery and infanticide, so it has been quite heavily modified since then. The central insight is that both individuals and societies, or social groups, develop their values by living them. Moral questions cannot be answered entirely by reasoning: we discover what kind of creatures we are by living; we develop virtues, like vices, by practising them. A compassionate society is one that treats its members compassionately, not one that makes speeches about the need to do so.

More subtly, the values of a society are developed and maintained by its institutions. These need not be branches of the state. In fact it’s essential that many of them aren’t. Trade unions, food banks, football leagues, even reading groups all qualify, but many will always be religious. It would be stupid and self-destructive to make such groups feel useless and unwanted. The nervousness over Christmas, or even over expressing religious belief, is an absurd expression of a real void at the heart of soulless technocracy.